The printing history of these woodcut maps for Ptolemy's
ancient text suggest the strong interest in mapping Europe during the middle of
the sixteenth century. This map reuses one of several plates designed in
Strasbourg by Lorenz Fries. These, in turn, were reduced versions of the twenty
"modern" or revised maps of Martin Waldseemüller (1513). Fries was an
Alsatian physician and astrologer who had studied in Italy, had written a
treatise on the spas in Germany and Switzerland, and became involved in the
republication of Waldseemüller's maps with Peter Apian in 1520. This
particular edition was edited in Lyons by Michael Villanovus (or Servetus), who
was tried for heresy and burned at the stake by Calvinists in Geneva in 1553.
One of the accusations for which he was tried was ostensibly using the label
"infertile" in his 1522 map of the Holy Land.